Jay-Z, Carol’s Daughter + The Hip Hop Bailout

Jay-Z stopped by Carol’s Daughter for a soft opening of their store at the Pentagon City Mall in VA, he’s also performing at the HSAN Ball. It’s a pretty big accomplishment for kid from the projects to be making so many big moves. After all Jay-Z is in the new President’s Ipod.

One New York paper is actually asking for Obama to offer Hip Hop a little bit of help of it’s own stating the since Obama will be the first President who has

Jay-Z and Kanye West on his iPod, the first one who speaks the culture’s language, the first one who embraces its mannerisms, from fist-bumping with his wife to throwing his hands in the air and waving like he just don’t care…

Could a hip hop bail out be in the works?

The Newsday article informs us that, While sales of rock music dropped only 6.5 percent last year, hip-hop sales dropped nearly 20 percent, and hip hop is now the sixth most popular music on the charts just beating gospel music. Could a hip hop bailout really help the struggling industry? While hip hop has it’s bright spots willing to usher in change, it’s has got so bad that even BET has pretty much turned it’s back on the music. Remember a few years ago when you could turn on BET and catch all your favorite videos from 10am until 9pm? Now they show reruns of College Hill, Hell Date and the Wayan’s Bros. rather than the latest blinged out rapper rapping about booty butt cheeks.

Have you ever stopped and asked yourself why has hip hop fell off? Leatrice of Atlanta and owner of Brown Girl Excursions believes it’s “because right now artists lack focus. They hone in on dollars and miss the purity of creativity and passion for the audience” I agree with her, but on the other hand as an artist it takes focus to even be in this game. Shaunette of Florida claims “the masses are complacent with mediocrity such as Solider Boy, Plies, and any other commercial n*gga out there and those examples are purely far from hip-hop. But yet they sell the most..Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Q-Tip don’t sell as much” So, what does that tell you about society? Even though what people believe is good music doesn’t sell the most, there is still an almost unanimous cry for good music. A friend of mine said, they like a few songs, but no one has yet to create anything that makes me want to be a fan.

I think that’s it, you have to be a fan of someone’s music in order to go out and purchase their album. If I’m not a fan, honestly I’m just going to download it and bump a few songs on my ipod. For the sake of argument let’s say that Barack Obama just gave the industry execs the multibillion dollar bailout package what would they do with it?

I believe the execs would spend it on marketing for their friends, cousins and their man’s an em’ who has a little flow and the ability to rhyme words that don’t go together. I believe they would take half the money to buy more cars, jets, vocoders and skinny jeans. Instead of investing in instruments, voice lessons, teaching artist how to read and write music notes and also investing in the community to show them the full range of the arts. A hip hop bailout can be invested in learning the struggle of the people who buy music, which can go a long way to produce music that will actually make people want to listen. Sure we want to dance, sure we need a theme song to f*ck hoes, drink and smoke too, but we also need music to put on after we’ve had a hard day of work. We need a song that captures the feeling we get when our boss has us do something dumb, when the rent has to be paid late, as well as a nice respectful song about how much we love our significant other. We need these things just as much as we need anthems about getting drunk and forgetting what we did. We need this regardless if they are sung by someone wearing skinny jeans and using a vocoder.

Fact is we need more than just one type of music from an artist. We need an artist who is going to cover all these topics because on monday I want to relax, Wednesday I want to love my lady and by Friday I’m ready to hit the club spend a little money getting drunk with people I don’t know. I have a plethora of emotions, wants and needs and I want an artist who can capture all of those things in an album. Take Tupac, he told the ladies to keep their head up and then told the ladies hey I get around. He shot 5 people no reason and then led a revolution of millions. There are no boundaries to music or life, but all too often our favorite artist are put in a box to keep them from reaching their full potential and us from reaching in our pockets to spend money.

So should hip hop receive a bail out? I say no, they’ll just misuse it, and produce even more cookie cutter artist who wouldn’t know what creativity is if it hit them in the jaw with the force of a Mike Tyson punch in 1989.

As my good friend and colleague Kandis Knight said via twitter “Greed made alot of people loose touch with reality.”

Written By BlogXilla